 | By Woody Leonhard With a market penetration somewhere north of 97%, just about every Windows user — heck, every Mac and Linux user — runs Adobe’s Flash Player. Few people realize that Flash maintains its own cookies in the form of Local Shared Objects that are completely outside your browser’s control, so managing them involves some significant gymnastics. |
Flash objects aren’t your grandma’s cookies
I don’t get too worked up about plain old browser cookies these days, but I’ve become aware of a new threat to Web privacy: the Local Shared Objects (LSOs) stored in Adobe’s Flash Player. LSOs are bigger — and potentially badder — than your average everyday cookie.
But first, let me give you a little cookie refresher course.
I probably don’t need to tell you that a cookie is a text file written to your computer by a Web site (but I just did). The site puts identifying information inside its cookie, such as the date and time of your last visit, how you like your start page to look, and other “remember me” kinds of stuff.
These “first-party” cookies serve a useful purpose: they allow a site to personalize the information you see based on the data it retrieves from the cookie it stores on your computer.
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